Can I give my airline miles to another person for free travel?

It depends on your airline. However, if 60,000 miles will buy the ticket, it might be easier for you to purchase the ticket with the miles in his/her name. My mom does this all the time (uses my dad’s miles to buy my tickets home). You’d have to get together and figure out what flight is best for them, but that shouldn’t be too painful.

Otherwise, I know you can “gift” miles from some airlines, but I do not know if Northwest is one of them.

Oh! And just in case you think my mom can do that because we are family and have the same last name, she also did it for my sister’s boyfriend and offers to do it for my boyfriend. It’s not a family issue.

I say “did” for my sister because they are married now, but want to make it clear it was possible before that.

Northwest will charge you to ‘gift’ the miles. They charge based upon increments and limit how many you can give or transfer. What I do with mine is purchase the ticket for the person. I just put their name on the ticket.

You could do this, even if you weren’t traveling together. I sent one of our employees back to Argentina to visit his family as a bonus. I just used my miles to buy the ticket for him.

You have more than enough time to book. You can book online or by phone. It’s the same process you would use to book your own flight. It’s actually easier online and you don’t have to pay a fee that you would over the phone.

If 60,000 will not buy the ticket, you can pay to transfer the miles to her account (assuming you are trying to add enough miles to her account to buy the ticket). As I said earlier, there are fees based upon increments. It will likely cost you several hundred dollars to transfer as many as 60,000. Gifting is a little different, but I think you can only gift 10,000 or 20,000 per year.